Key Benefits of CNI Membership

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) provides unique insight into significant trends and facilitates community efforts to advance scholarship through the innovative and strategic application of information technology; we take a leadership role in areas that matter:

CNI helps organizations in their strategic planning efforts, identifying key developments, signaling critical trends and providing environmental scans. Members use the Coalition’s annual Program Plan, as well as material from our other publications and our meetings, as part of their institutional planning process.

Membership meetings provide opportunities to learn about the latest technologies, content, and applications. CNI has a long history of being the first to offer discussion of major developments, from Mosaic to Digital Libraries, from the Google Book Scanning program to NSF’s DataNet awards and ITHAKA’s faculty survey results. CNI meetings foster collaborations across the wide variety of sectors represented within the membership, and they also offer opportunities to showcase your own organization’s work and to make connections with others involved in related projects.

CNI produces publications and reports, and provides alerts, regarding newly released information and upcoming events on topics of importance to the community. We make publications, videos, podcasts and slide decks from meetings, presentations, talks and interviews available online and discoverable by subject area. Your entire organization can have access to the most current information on pressing issues from CNI’s website, via our CNI-ANNOUNCE listserv, and through the CNI News feed.

CNI can bring expertise and perspective to your institution. Members of the CNI staff frequently visit campuses and other institutions to participate in events focused on issues such as scholarly communication, e-science, digital humanities, repositories and scholarly information management, and learning spaces. We welcome opportunities to meet with member organizations to discuss developments, and to be part of conference programs.

CNI acts as an important and respected voice on behalf of our community in a wide range of national and international policy and funding venues. As a valued partner in strategy development and policy formulation, CNI works with and is called upon by various agencies and organizations, such as the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Jisc in the UK, and the German Research Foundation, for advice and insight.